The Rise and Fall of Baltasar Garzón

In 1998, Garzón had former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet arrested during a visit to London, although Britain ultimately refused to extradite him to Madrid for trial. In the years that followed, Garzón used the principle of universal jurisdiction to go after current or former government officials such as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and around 100 leaders of the 1976-1983 military junta in Argentina.

At one point, Garzón and his colleagues were pursuing more than a dozen international investigations into alleged cases of torture, genocide, and crimes against humanity in places as far-flung as Colombia, Tibet, and Rwanda. Most of these cases had had little or no connection to Spain and critics accused Garzón of interpreting the concept of universal jurisdiction too loosely.

Calls to rein in the judges increased when Spanish magistrates announced probes involving Israel and the United States. In January 2009, Spanish National Court Judge Fernando Andreu said he would investigate seven current or former Israeli officials over a 2002 air attack in Gaza. In March of that year, Garzón said he would investigate six Bush administration officials for giving legal cover to torture at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. That May, another Spanish high-court judge, Santiago Pedraz, said he would charge three U.S. soldiers with crimes against humanity for the April 2003 deaths of a Spanish television cameraman and a Ukrainian journalist. The men were killed when a U.S. tank crew shelled their Baghdad hotel.

In any case, Garzón and his colleagues have been highly selective about the cases they pursue. For example, they have never attempted to prosecute any Palestinian terrorists for war crimes. Nor have they had much zeal for investigating crimes against humanity in Chechnya or Darfur. Nor have they prosecuted any of the suspected Nazi war criminals who sought refuge in Spain after the end of World War II.

In 2009, Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido asked Garzón to shelve his case against the Americans and warned of the risks of turning the Spanish justice system into a “plaything” for politically motivated prosecutions. Rather than heeding that advice, Garzón redoubled his efforts to pursue U.S. officials suspected of authorizing and carrying out the alleged torture of four inmates at Guantánamo Bay.

Concerned that Spain’s judicial system was being hijacked by left-wing groups out to pursue political vendettas (and that Spain’s media savvy judges were more interested in scoring political points than in upholding the law), the Spanish parliament in 2009 passed a bill to narrow the scope of the universal jurisdiction law to cases in which the victims of a crime include Spaniards or the alleged perpetrators were in Spain.

But old habits die hard. In January 2012, Garzón’s successor, Judge Pablo Rafael Ruz Gutiérrez, reactivated the investigation into the alleged torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. In a 19-page ruling, Ruz said he would seek additional information in the case of the four Guantánamo captives, who have since been released, but who allege they were humiliated and subjected to torture while in U.S. custody.

Because the United States has not pursued the matter, Ruz said, his court has jurisdiction to investigate the former U.S. officials named in the former detainees’ complaint. Those officials include former President George W. Bush; former Vice President Dick Cheney; former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; and two former Guantánamo commanders, retired Marine Major General Michael Lehnert and retired Army Major General Geoffrey Miller.

Garzón’s friends on the left, both inside Spain and abroad, have expressed outrage that the “crusading human rights judge” was hoist with his own petard. In a rather hysterical editorial, the New York Times, for example, described the Spanish high court ruling as an “appalling attack on judicial independence.”

Not everyone agrees. Spanish Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón said the ruling demonstrated “the normal functioning of our institutions.” Esperanza Aguirre, the head of Madrid’s center-right regional government, said “it is a happy day for the rule of law.”

Henry Kissinger once warned that “universal jurisdiction risks creating universal tyranny–that of judges.” In Spain, the judges, led by Garzón, have been responsible for their own undoing.

Soeren Kern is Senior Analyst for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.

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1.
Spaniard

Garzon’s legal problems are not limited to Spain, it seems they have swum from the European shore of the Atlantic to the other: _All_ ecuatorian lawyers professional associations accuse Garzon of misappropiation of public funds.

First: Garzon has been suspended for eleven years because he spied the conversation between the accused and his lawyer. He got through for cheap: Spanishj law states a minimum sentence of ten years supension but it couild heva been a life time suspension and a jail sentence.

Second: It was an unanimous decision. In fact the vocal was a left wing of judge.

Third: Garzon has been found guilty of requiring money of companies with opened cases in exchange of filing them. He escaped sentence beacuuse of prescription. The plaint took place twenty days too late.

Fourth: Garzon made no mass grave opened. Here is a link in Spanish about the whole thing. http://www.abc.es/20100522/opinion-tercera/garzon-nunca-investigo-crimenes-20100522.html. I will summarize briefly: there was a demand for an investigation in order to find the graces of people who had disappeared during the Spanish Civil War. It was qualified as abductions. Garzon did nothhing about it between othere reasons because he was not competent for such cases: he was judge of instruction for cases of terrorism and attempts to overthrow thengovernment. Then suddenly he decided the nationalist raise in 1936 was an attempt agaisnt the government sio he was competent and he indicted theirty odd people, one of them Franco. BTW Franco would have been about 110 years ols and all the people on his list had been dead for decades. He asked for Franco’s death certificate After a month he closed the case saying all indicted people were dead and anyway he declares himself incompetent about the case. But in the whole thing there were investigations, zero mass graves opneed, zero everything. It was ever a PR operation for Garzon. At tax payer’s expense.

5) There was an amanesty law covering what happened during the Civil War on both sides and that means Garzon was violating the law. Sevarl years before there was aplaint against Santiago Carrillo former head of Spain’s Communist Party and author of the massacres of Paracuellos aka Spain’s Katyn (six thousand dead). In that case Garzon filed the case after invvoking the law of amnesty.

Sir, you are joking but could be right. The UN has already asked the law of amnesty declared void. The same one that allowed Santiago Carrillo to escape prosecution for Paracuellos and Torrejon, supposedly the victim got reparations and that was enough. Unlike Franco he is a communist,to be fair, he began eurocommunism along Berlinguer, who broke ties with the Soviet Union , and unlike Franco is still alive.
He also dismissed prosecution of Castro

The whole business of international jurisdiction creates
results that are
endlessly complicated and bizarre – and often unjust, by
most people’s moral compass.

The famous case about Pinochet, whom the judge wanted
extradited to Spain for crimes against Spanish citizens
in Chile is a case in point. Spanish (and any other,
except diplomats) citizens in Chile are subject to
Chilean law, whether as perps or as victims, NOT their
“home” jurisdiction.

Claiming anything else produces bizarre results. Take an example:
A young woman living in the US but is a recent immigrant and a
citizen of Iran. She has an affair with a local boy (let’s
assume for simplicity that they are both over 18).

Lets assume that prior to the affair she was a virgin.

Now the local boy visits Germany, which is famous (and infamous) for
respecting extradition treaties. Now, Germany has such a treaty with
Iran. (Or at least it did at one time.)

So the Iranians ask the Germans to arrest him and extradite him to Iran,
since seduction of a virgin is a serious crime under Iranian law.

Now, does this make sense? Well if you don’t think so, have another think
about international jurisdiction.

There is an public order exception and some rules on extradition. For example Venezuela has never, even during dictatorship, extradited people to countries with death penalty of jail time over 30 years, unless the country( the USA has done it many times compromise not to apply that penalty)

How sweet. Spain is about to release a reincident and unrepentent child raper. he was allowedf a leave during a previous jail sentence and he raped and killed in so gruesome way the guardiaciviles were sick. But Spain is a humanitarian country: no sentence can exceed 20 years. Too bad for little girls: there iis no death penalty for criminals (not even lfe sentences) but thre is one for them

Speaking of Garzon’s most celebrated case, the Pinochet affair: How many knew that Pinochet did not engineer a “coup,” but acted at the behest of Chile’s national assembly? A majority of the deputies, like at least a plurality of the Chilean public, were very alarmed at what Allende was doing. This was much the same scenario as what happened in Honduras a couple of years ago. remember that debacle? Obama, Hillary and the MSM insisted on calling that a coup as well.

Even Wikipedia won’t tell you that Pinochet was acting at the behest of a majority of elected Chilean officials. I didn’t find out unitl rather recently. It was easy to be ignorant: the world outside of Chile simply didn’t report that fact.

We aren’t at all surprised to heard about judge Garzón’s dismissal from the bench. We were always critical of his overzealous attitude and rather biased application of justice. His personal vendetta against General Pinochet of Chile is a case in point. Pinochet saved his country from falling into the communists camp, and besides he brought the ailing Chile’s economy into the twenty century. Generalísimo Francisco Franco of Spain stopped point blank the communist take over of Spain, and paved the ground for it’s economic recovery.
Garzón was a good man, however, he tried too hard in order to emulate the “illustrious Manchego”, bent into repairing the wrong doing all over the world, a sort of mental aberration known as: the delusional thinking of the “social reivindicator” A diagnosis that might also be applied collectively to the populists, leftist and multiculturalist from all over the world.